Chart the Moon

Abstract

Chart the Moon Sarah Richards Graba (bio) Phase 1: New Moon Phase 2: Waxing Crescent. Phase 3: First Quarter Half Moon. Phase 4: Waxing Gibbous. Phase 5: Full Moon. Phase 6: Waning Gibbous. Phase 7: Last Quarter Half Moon. Phase 8: Waning Crescent. Phase 0: No Moon I complain to my husband about the difficulty of writing this, how I'm unable to identify the ritual my mother and I perform whenever we argue. How I can't ever seem to nail down specifics. How only the feeling of being angry, of being guilty, stays withme. He asks, "Have you talked to your mom about it?" I reply, "No. She would would just say something like, 'Did I abuse you as a child? Was I a bad mother?'" "It sounds like you already know the ritual," he replied. I sit down and light a candle to write this. I draw a card from the tarot deck. I turn on classical music and I try to let things flow through me. Eight of Cups: abandonment. I know this just from the picture, before I look up the meaning. I decide to write inside the phases of the moon, although it's not all that domestic, the moon. I begin to write in the space titled: "Phase 5: Full Moon." I stop. I look up the meaning of the card: abandonment. I try to write ritually but all that occurs is a jumping about. I'm uncomfortable in this space, placed in the center column. I jump out. For weeks I've been talking to Wes about memory storage for computers, trying to understand how the brain works by trying to understand those machines. They are modeled after us, a simplified version, Wes once said, "Or—maybe… less elegant." He explains that sometimes there are hidden files in the nonvolatile memory; that sometimes we need a key. And sometimes there's a backdoor. And someone like a hacker would try to exploit the algorithm that encrypts the data, because there are too many possibilities to go through all the permutations. You stand with your back to me, the moon at your face. Your face is shadowed; I can make out a blotted profile, but no emotion. Are you leaving me behind, mom? Now that I am grown, are we done arguing? Or is that me out there, face shadowed, not looking back, and leaving you? I am trying my own permutations now, trying to find my own key, or the backdoor. 1's and 0's in a number of possibilities. "But there needs to be a seed," Wes says. "Even if the pattern is random, it's still a pattern, and you still have to give it something to start with, the first input into your number generator algorithm," he says. "If you know what the seeding was, you can build a backdoor." I'm searching for seeds, something to start with. I wonder what it means that nothing grew out of my buried manuscript except for worms. I move to this section next because it's also in the center and I'm uncomfortable here, so I want to get it over with. I think it's easier as an immigrant's daughter to view from the outside. To write on the edges. Being in the center feels fake. Nothing revolves around me, and nothing should be anchored by me either. I try my hand at waning. I like the idea of waning. Of the sliver that's left, that will disappear soon. The energy that is fading, almost faded, almost gone into darkness. It will be a few more weeks before the moon looks like this again. The shadow across its face, registering empty cups, strewn here and there. It is easier to leave. To strike out again upon something new. You know, when the moon is a crescent, it's really just that the earth is playing as a shadow puppet upon its face. And so I begin again, in the center. If there is no anchor here, how can I begin? I sit in the center and feel uncomfortable. I resolve to stay with it for as...